Submergence
by Crowmunculus
Summary: Al despairs in his guilt in a room a universe away from his own, and the ghost at the table lets him drown.


**A/N: From a verse I'll never publish because it's way too creepy and wangsty. Guess the pairings, guys! :D  
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**Background: Al thinks Alfons hurt Ed and kills him in a rage, then realizes he's wrong. He never tells Ed, never forgives himself, starts remembering Alfons's memories, and spirals into insanity. Cheerful, huh?**

**So more creepy mindfuck dreamfic because I'm a sucker for this trope. (I'm not just a one-trick pony, I swear. I know at least TWO whole tricks!) I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's probably hard to pronounce. Rated for dark themes and blood. Also, purposefully messed-up tenses for stylistic purposes, because I am clearly all about style.**

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It is not the first time Al has had a dream like this. He is in the dilapidated flat his brother had shared with Alfons, but he is himself, not seeing the world through his alternate's eyes, and though Ed is not there he's not alone: Alfons sat across the grimy kitchen table in one of the two spindly chairs, smiling at him with far more warmth than any sane person would be able to show to their murderer.

"I know you didn't mean it," his counterpart said and damn the man, damn him because he was smiling and sincere and much too understanding. "I know you would have never meant it."

_You don't know me_, Al considers saying, but it isn't true, this _is_ him, but not - this was who he could have been if he'd only made better choices, lived his life a little better, been a better person. This was everything he could never be. Alfons wasn't a sinner.

Al claps his hands together and slaps them onto the table, transmuting a rough wooden blade from the surface. Alfons watched him silently, unmoving, smiling as ever with his face an eerie blue from the transmutation's light. Al lunges the finished blade across the table in a blink-fast flicker and slices Alfons's throat clean open. Just like that. Just like before.

Wake up. Wake up.

Alfons kept smiling. "Like that," he said softly, blood spraying from his throat in a thick red shower, burning into his immaculate white shirt, splattering wetly across the tabletop. The scene is all too familiar, and Al shivers, sick. "You know this is a dream, but you're scared. You wouldn't do that if you were awake." Blood came up his throat and out his lips with each word he said and spilled down his chin. Alfons's blood was the same color as Ed's coat, the coat Al buried Alfons in. But this is a dream and Al wears that coat, and Alfons wore another, made of blood. "You were asleep for a long time, weren't you, Al?"

"Shut up!" Al says. "You're not real!"

"Nothing was real for those two years," Alfons continued, all gentle and understanding, all too good for this, still bleeding, still fucking smiling, still not dead like he should be. "I'm glad I was able to wake you up."

The nightmare was wrong: he's still asleep. It's a dream, and closing his eyes does no difference; Al's eyelids are transparent and he sees straight through to that horrible mirror still bleeding in the back of his mind four years later. "I _killed_ you," he snarls to hide a sob. "Why won't you just _stay dead_?"

"You may have killed me, but I'm not dead. You know that," Alfons said, very much bleeding but very much alive at his place at the table, the table from the memories that did not belong to Al and never would. "How can I not be? I still affect you and Edward, even now. By keeping these memories for me, you keep me alive. I'm sorry they hurt you so much."

"Shut up!" Al says, because it's all he can say, and this dream is like another dream he's had where he was helpless, four years asleep in an unfeeling shell unable even to cry. He wants to cry but he can't. He can sob with dry eyes and rage and despair and scream until his throat gives out but this awful world won't let him cry, like his brother never let himself for all those years he hurt.

He'd killed Alfons, but Ed is the one who died.

Alfons watched him with a sickening look of pity, and the blood is so much now that it comes up to Al's ankles on the old wooden floor. It's all over Al's hands and clothes and hair and he can taste it bitter in his mouth. He would never, ever escape this, he knows.

He drowns more and more every day, but there is no one left to save him.


End file.
